Was unsure on best board for this question... suggestions gratefully received.

I am a video editor and I do production work and web work on a single system. If I understand correctly, McAfee scans files during read and write and this could impact performance pretty significantly. If I set real-time scanning to "Program Files and Documents Only" during a heavy render will this effectively give me back full performance? Or do I need to disable networking and turn off Virus and Spyware etc. protection entirely?

thanks in advance..

P.S. this is VirusScan 13.15 on a Dell Studio XPS 435MT with Vista/64 (soon to ne Win 7 happy

For its real time checking I think McAfee places itself in the file system read/write path and does some scanning on every read and/or write? Such would be very expensive during heavy IO of course, so that is my main concern. I dunno if this expense is avoided by temporarily turning off real-time scan, but that would seem the right way for the product to behave.

Yes I suppose it's true that any file in transit will be scanned in real time. You could temporarily disable VirusScan if it causes problems.

To temporarily turn off VirusScan do the following:

Double-click the taskbar icon to open Security CenterClick Advanced Menu (bottom left)Click Configure (left)Click Computer & Files (top left)You can disable VirusScan in the right-hand module and tell it for how long

Can someone please put this as a sticky?, a bulk email, in BIG BLOCK letters, that this is how you disable it? Put it at the top of the forum listings. PLEASE.

I mean, make it available to (staple to forehead-reverse first) anyone doing level-1 helpdesk support, who are reading from a script, whose command of english is secondary, who are representing McAfee, dealing with users who have more of a clue than they themselves?

Or perhaps a nice annoying pop-up, or a link somewhere in the read-me, or the about: link, or ANYWHERE someone could find it that they didn't have to google the support forums, instead of clicking links to get there, then, have to create an account to find it, I swear to god it's like one of those endless loop tech support phone calls from Sierra's hint-line at $9.95 a minute.

May I suggest if you sticky it, select a title representative of the problem and the fix, not a generic description like this thread. "Balancing performance and security" is like saying juggling viagra pills and condoms. Nobody wants to know which one you swallowed.

And who's brainless idea was it to get rid of exceptions of folder/applications to begin with? Drives?!? You can only exclude entire DRIVES? No more protected programs?

This is enough to make me re-evaluate the comfort, stability, and security of Norton (This is sarcasm. Do not treat it as honest willingness to drink Norton Kool-Aid). I might prefer the weekly ghosting, but I'm actually looking towards virtual desktops at this point for survivability.

I don't even want to go into what these brainless script-monkeys told me to do to resolve my "I can't exclude a program from the real-time scan list" issue.